A. K. RAMANUJAN’S INSIGHTFUL OBSERVATIONS ON VARIOUS ASPECTS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: LOOKING BRIEFLY AT THE DIARY ENTRIES
A. K. RAMANUJAN’S INSIGHTFUL OBSERVATIONS ON VARIOUS ASPECTS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: LOOKING BRIEFLY AT THE DIARY ENTRIES

Summary/Abstract: Attipat Krishnaswamy Ramanujan (16 March 1929–13 July 1993) traveled extensively in peninsular India, collecting folktales from rural regions. Since he was already on the move, as a folklorist and as a teacher who taught in several colleges in South India consecutively, it was not difficult for him to set sail for the United States of America when he received the Ful- bright Travel Fellowship and Smith-Mundt Grant in 1959, to continue with his studies in linguistics. On 1 July 1959 he boarded the Strathaird in Bombay and undertook a land-journey through France to reach Southampton, where he boarded the SS Queen Elizabeth, which took him to New York on 28 July 1959. He wrote about experiences and observations during this journey in his“Travel Diary, 2 to 27 July 1959, Bombay to New York,” in the anthology Journeys: A Poet’s Diary (2018). The first-ever travel overseas, to the US, was full of excite-ment and anxiety for the young man of thirty. This journey was the initiation for his passage to the country which he was to inhabit for the rest of his life, as a teacher at the University of Chicago—a transition from the familiar world (his interior landscape, akam) to the unfamiliar country (the world outside his self, the puram). The article shall focus on Journeys: A Poet’s Diary and A. K. Ramanujan’s unpublished diary to explore his observations and experiences of life in the US. These reveal the way in which his inner self met the new space he entered, followed by his expressing, through his creative and critical self, the interface and intermingling of the two. These travel writings go beyond mere records of observations—they are cultural artifacts left behind by a truly transnational traveler—a man from a South-Indian milieu, who had been exposed to the British system of education; who was exceptionally intelligent, a poet and critic, and a keen observer. Theories that engage with the akam- puram paradigm, the environment (Buel), culture in a liquid modern world (Bauman) and cosmopolitanism (Appiah) will be employed as analytical tools to examine and evaluate the selected texts.

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